[SEQ RERUN] Archimedes's Chronophone

What surprised me is that many took for granted that the abolition of slavery in the Greek world was economically and socially feasible without making the Greeks less an influence on later civilization than they where.

Modern morals simply don't work very well in the ancient world. This goes for a variety of practices and laws that modern Westerners find abhorrent. To borrow Robin Hanson's vocabulary if you succeed in convincing ancient farmers to be more like foragers morality wise, this would not result in history being prettier in our eyes, but in them being displaced by other farmers with farmer values, since they will be, you know, better farmers.

Edit: Changed everyone to many in the first sentence.

Well, the obvious problem is that I can't convince Archimedes of anything I currently believe by providing arguments for it. Once you realize that, the next logical conclusion is to simply try to improve Archimedes' beliefs. For instance, if I were to critique modern science and its failures relative to bayesianism, it would come out as a critique of Archimedes' system of obeying authority. Additionally, I've recently been wondering about the line between sentience and non-sentience, and more specifically if animals like dolphins might actually deserve to be classified as "people" (as a side note, if anyone knows of any research on just how sentient dolphins are, I would be really interested in seeing it). If I were to talk about that, I suspect it would come out as a series of musings about whether women, slaves, etc, might deserve personhood rights.

If I try to be clever and argue for something I don't personally believe, there will be flaws that I can see in the argument, which will translate to flaws that Archimedes can see easily. So for instance, I can't put together a series of arguments in favor of slavery, because I will see flaws in those arguments. One obvious way I could get around this is to put someone else on the phone. I'm sure I can find a very well educated priest or rabbi who believes that following authority is the best system of epistemology, and despises science. That individuals arguments (of course, I wouldn't explain how the chronophone worked) would come out as arguments that sound convincing to Archimedes that following authority is bad. I could do something similar with my dolphin idea by putting the most eloquent speaker for PETA I could find.

I think RobinZ's comment is great:

I think my major problem with this article is that the perfectly reasonable conclusion - that you can't do better in the future [of] today by thinking today's cached thoughts about how people in the past could have done better in the future of the past - is obscured by the utterly ridiculous device of the eponymous chronophone.

I think EY's story might still be useful if it were prefaced with RobinZ's comment and the chronophone as an example of how you have to think about your present problem.

If you want to do better in today's future you have to figure out what you should be doing differently than you have been. The answer can't be 'apply the scientific method!' because we already do that. Useful answers might be 'think about where we should apply the scientific method where we haven't been applying it already' or 'think about how to improve the process of science'. If we give these answers to the chronophone, archimedes should hear that he should think about his own process of discovery and how to apply it to novel situations or how to improve his process. Of course this advice is vague so perhaps they won't be of much use, but thats the kind of questions we need to work on.

My first thought is to just discuss methods of learning things. It will get Archimedes to discuss methods of learning things, and could result in him thinking of the scientific method.

Also, does he know about how this works? If so, I'd talk about the scientific method, he'd hear about his epistemological approach, realize that I feel it is important to talk about an epistemological approach, and figure that I must believe his is wrong. He'll then think about it, and may come up with the scientific method.

I wonder what would happen if I just construct an argument that slavery is good.

I think we are getting into meatier posts now, hopefully there will be more interesting discussions in the comments.

I noticed that the post and the comments were a little bit vague on what exactly does or doesn't belong in my 'culture'. Would arguing that nudity is good translate into something obvious and true (like for most Europeans, as I understand it), or would it turn into something absurd and possibly evil (like how I think most Americans see it)? In other words, whenever the examples talk about zeitgeists, am I to translate that into generalizing from the example of me?

Arguing for evolution is super-obvious to me, but a large fraction of Alaskans aren't too keen on the idea. So if I told the chronophone about natural selection while I'm in Alaska, would it tell Archimedes that humans are featherless chickens... but if I said it in the midst of a Biology symposium, it would tell him that humans are mortal?

My guess is that you can't change your affiliations so easily, because it avoids the point of the hypothetical. But I would be interested to see what comes out if I tell him about all the things that I think other cultures do better than my own.

I liked that article! The main takeaway is separating "knowing how to think" from various trivia, but the exercise is fun too:

I'd talk about how difficult it is to actually figure things out, to get correct beliefs in science, history, politics etc. About the times I've changed my minds, about the things I must admit I don't know enough about to have a much of an opinion (like economics), while still knowing that there probably is a right answer, and that I have to avoid the toxic ambient anti-epistemology (things like "everyone can hold the opinion he wants", or "changing your mind is a sign of weakness", or "you have to listen to your heart"), or the cheap way out of taking a middle ground position on everything.

I'd talk about various subjects where I suspect the conventional wisdom is wrong, about what the alternatives are, and about how likely those are to be wrong too.

I'd talk about the unfortunate fact that even scientists don't tend to update their beliefs enough, and that we have to wait for them to die out before new views can be accepted. I'd talk about various ways of correcting that (betting markets, open-access journals, various schemes of debate tools I've come up with back in the days when I was interested in that), and caution about whether those would really improve things.

I'd talk about the failure modes of smart people, and how to try correcting for those.

Isn't the straight forward answer to not communicate in cached thoughts, build everything form shared fundamentals and over time build a new shared language to explain modern concepts to Archimedes?

The rules do not seem to stop this and as long as Archimedes is dedicated to the task you could communicate arbitrarily complex ideas.